


the crossroads of disaster

by lostsometime



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Day 28, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Whump, Whumptober 2020, the shadowgast is just like canon-level implied mutual interest, this is really mostly gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27279325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostsometime/pseuds/lostsometime
Summary: The first thing Jester does when they arrive back in the Lucid Bastion is Send to Essek.“Hey!  We’re back!  You wanna come over?  We’ve got so much to tell you!  Caduceus is making dinner, so if you wanna swing by in-”“Jester."  His voice sounds shaky.  "There’s been an – incident.  In my lab.  Please come.  I need – help.  Be careful."Or: Essek gets himself in trouble
Relationships: Essek Thelyss & Caleb Widogast, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast, The Mighty Nein & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 6
Kudos: 300
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	the crossroads of disaster

The first thing Jester does when they arrive back in the Lucid Bastion is _Send_ to Essek. 

“Hey! We’re back! You wanna come over? We’ve got _so much_ to tell you! Caduceus is making dinner, so if you wanna swing by in-”

She’s trying to decide if it’s worth it to send a second message when she gets his reply. His voice in her mind sounds shaky, and she stops in the middle of the street, worried.

“Jester. There’s been an – incident. In my lab. Please come. I need – help. Be careful. There’s – security. In the tower. I can’t – turn it off.”

Beau turns to see why she’s stopped walking, but before she can ask, Jester takes off down the road in a dead sprint, her petticoats fluttering as she heads for the distant spire of Essek’s tower.

\--

“What do you think he meant by “security?” Fjord asks, as they stand hesitantly outside the front door.

“Likely there are traps,” Caleb answers. “Mages of a certain level tend to accrue valuable arcane items, and most defend them against burglars with some degree of enchantment.”

Beau rolls her eyes. “What he _means_ is that wizards are _ridiculous_ and they like to show off how smart they are by filling their stupid houses with a bunch of stupid magic _bullshit_.”

“That is… another way to put it, I suppose. Regardless, we should proceed with caution.”

\--

While Veth works on the locks, Jester tries to _Send_ to Essek again. She gets no response. She relates this to the others with obvious concern, but tries to stay positive. “I feel like,” she says, “if he were, like, _dead_ , I would be able to tell. Like the spell wouldn’t have anywhere to _go._ I can tell the spell is _working_ , he’s just… he’s not answering. So maybe he’s unconscious? Or something might be stopping him from responding? Is that a thing that can happen?”

No one has an answer to that, and they stand around in an uncomfortable silence, before Caleb finally speaks up. 

“I think,” he says, “that we should try to be prepared for any possibility. We know better than anyone the precarious position Essek has put himself in. If the Assembly is involved, there’s no telling what could or could not happen. I would not put anything past them.” There is a grim but determined look on his face that Beau recognizes from their raid on the Sour Nest – a look that says _It’s probably too late already, but we’re doing this anyway_. The look of a man trying to brace himself for the worst as if it’ll hurt less to be proven right than it would to have any kind of hope and see it dashed. For Caleb’s sake, more than anything, Beau hopes Essek is still breathing when they get to him.

\--

The first trap is honestly pretty obvious. Essek’s living space is largely without any kind of artistic decoration, so it’s fairly clear when they find a highly ornamental suit of antique Krynn armor on the staircase’s first landing that something is up. Fjord groans.

“We’re gonna have to fight that thing, aren’t we?”

“Probably.” Beau shrugs. “I think it’s just waiting for us to turn our backs. That or there’s some kind of pressure plate trigger…” She squints at the immaculate stonework around the armor’s feet.

It turns out to have an arcane trigger rather than a mechanical one, and Beau is kicking herself for having the gall to think for even an instant that _something_ in this tower might not be filled with completely gratuitous, show-offy magical _bullshit_. She ducks in close to _Extract Aspects_ on the thing and is entirely unsurprised to find that it can’t be stunned. She _is_ surprised when, after deflecting a hefty blow from Yasha’s sword, the armored entity draws out what looks like a little crystal marble and crushes it to the floor. A strange shadow swells up and soon she’s looking at a full-size shadow copy of Essek – an Echo, like the ones he’d taught Caleb to summon.

“Shit! Heads up --!” Her shout is enough to pull Caleb’s attention to the Echo in time for him to snap off a _Counterspell_ on whatever it was trying to cast. Magical energy expended, the shadow-Essek fades away. The animated armor is already pulling out another of those marbles, though, and she decides that getting those away from it is going to have to be Priority Number One. It only manages to call up one more of the Echoes before Yasha downs it with another powerful swing and drives her sword through its chestplate, finally dispersing the arcane energy holding it together.

As they catch their breath in the ringing silence after the battle, Beau says “He’d better not complain that we broke his cool magic armor, that’s all I’m saying.” It draws a laugh from most of the Nein, though Caleb still has his grim-soldier face on. Beau offers him the small handful of Echo-making marbles she’d managed to snatch from the construct and finally wins the faint flicker of a smile.

\--

As they continue up the main tower, they find themselves in a narrow, winding staircase. The only light is the faint ambient glow of the stone – the same sort that comprises the outside of the tower. They’re quickly funneled into walking single-file, up and up and up as they rapidly lose track of how many floors they should have traversed. After several minutes of tense silence, climbing in the claustrophobic dimness, Caleb says “Wait.”

The others pause, and turn to look in his direction. He’s stopped a ways below them, pressing his hands to the stone walls on either side of him with a look of intense concentration. He snaps his Dancing Lights into existence, and the rest of them blink, startled by the sudden light. “This shouldn’t be here,” he continues.

“Remember, Veth? We’ve been up here before. When he took us to his laboratory before, there were only a few stories to the tower, and none of them were this closed in.”

“We don’t really know how many “security” traps he’s got,” Jester points out. “Maybe it’s magic.”

“Exactly. And if it’s magic…” Caleb trails off, sketching the runes for _Dispel Magic_ in the air before him. Each one hangs in the air briefly, flame-bright. When they dissipate, they take with them a strange pressure that they hadn’t noticed until it was gone, like the popping of their ears after their deep dive to Dashilla’s lair. The spell also takes away the whole scene around them, the corridor and the stone steps and the darkness, revealing that the Nein are arrayed in a circle in the center of a broad, flat landing. 

Caleb looks around with satisfaction, murmuring “Sometimes the simplest solutions…” He nods towards the real staircase. “Shall we?”

-

Eventually they reach a door that looks familiar to Caleb and Veth, behind which lies Essek’s workroom and, hopefully, Essek. Veth reaches towards the lock with her tools, but Caleb grabs her hand with a fervid “No!” She looks up at him, and he pulls her further from the door, hissing, “Check. For. Traps.”

“Oh. Right.” She lets out a nervous laugh as she hands the tools off to her _Mage Hand_ to go poke around for danger while she stands with Caleb at a safe distance. At the first touch of the picks, the lock discharges an arcane jolt of electricity. The bolt travels through the metal of the pick and into her mage hand, where it dissipates. “Uh… that, that was a good call there, Lebbie, huh? Good catch.”

Caleb does not look amused.

\--

The door unlocked, they push into the room to find Essek crumpled on the flagstones, his head haloed by a puddle of blood. Jester darts to his side and rolls him over as gently as she can, trying to get a look at whatever wounds have done this to him. His head lolls, and she cradles it in her lap, but can’t find any obvious injuries. The blood is trickling from his nose and ears, and streaked from the inner corners of his eyes like tears. When she turns him on his back, she can feel his ribs shift and grate under her hands, fractured. The change in position wrings a low groan from him. The way his chest moves with his breathing is _wrong_ somehow and it worries her. Warm pink light surrounds her hands as she fretfully strokes his hair, discharging a healing spell at a higher level than she thinks is strictly necessary, just to be sure.

He begins to stir back to consciousness with another soft sound of pain. By the time he blinks open his eyes, though, the damage to his chest seems to be mostly mended, and his breathing has steadied. It seems to take a little longer for him to properly process where he is and what’s happened, and she’s not sure if that’s because of a head injury or if maybe he just didn’t expect that they would actually come to help him.

“Essek, what _happened_ to you?” Now that the most imminent danger has passed, Jester can no longer contain her curiosity.

“Was it the Assembly? The Dynasty?”

“No, no, I – ” Essek brings one hand up to press against his temple gently. “I’m – a fool. A fool and a failure, and I – I tried to experiment – before I was ready. I should have known…”

“Experiment?” Caleb’s voice is sharp. “Essek, do you mean to say you did this to _yourself_?”

Essek quirks one eyebrow, his expression a pale imitation of his usual sardonic humor. “Not deliberately, I can assure you.”

“ _Essek!”_ Jester's outburst is evidently a bit too loud for him, sitting so close, and he winces. “What did you _do_?”

He tries to push himself upright and tips dangerously to one side until she scoots over to prop him up with one shoulder. His balance is still completely shot – probably a side effect of whatever left him bleeding from the ears.

“I was, ah, trying to modify one of my higher-level spells and I… _Light,_ this is embarrassing, I must have miscalculated the minimum safe distance. Caught myself in my own gravity field. An amateur’s mistake, I can’t _believe_ \- _!”_ He buries his face in the palms of his hands. 

Jester thinks briefly of their first day in Xorhas and the fight they had in the mountains with the Krynn mage. He’d been throwing around gravity spells, too, and Essek – she recognizes, now, that Essek looks like those few men who survived it. She remembers, too, what happened to the ones who _didn’t_ , how badly their bodies had been crushed. The realization of just how close to disaster Essek must have been sends a sudden rush of belated terror through her and she abruptly turns and wraps him up in a hug.

“You need to be more careful!” she says, fierce.

Taken by surprise, his arms are still bent when she grabs him, and he twists one free to pat her awkwardly on the back.

“I, ah – I apologize. And I… thank you, Jester. Thank you all. It seems I owe you my life, once again.”

“It’s whatever,” Beau says. “It’s not like we’re, you know, _keeping track of favors_ or anything.”

“Beau!”

“What?! I’m just saying!”

\--

As the girls fall to good-natured bickering, Caleb sits on the laboratory floor to be closer to eye level and goes to speak. Essek feels a brief stab of dread; Caleb has been so quiet through the conversations, and he worries that he’s angered him.

He finds himself proven right when Caleb bites out, “That was stupid.”

“I know, I – I am sorry. Truly, I am.”

“I believe you. But you’re sorry for the wrong thing. You don’t need to apologize for making a mistake on the spell.”

“But I – ”

“The last time we spoke about your experiments, do you remember? Beauregard pointed out how dangerous it is to investigate the mysteries of the arcane. And you said, ‘that’s why you work alone.’ I thought at the time that it was a foolish thing to say but it didn’t seem like it was my place to challenge you on it. You were – _are_ – a far more accomplished wizard than I, and I didn’t want to risk offending you, but Essek, _this is why you **don’t** work alone_. This is exactly why you need other people around you! Even _one_ other person – someone to bring you a potion or call for help when something goes wrong. Shutting yourself up alone like this is worse than arrogant, it is _stupid_ , and it is _dangerous_ , and it _almost got you killed._ Do you understand?”

“I do,” says Essek slowly, “and you’re not wrong, but, Caleb – what else am I meant to do? I can’t just _bring someone else in,_ this is my _home,_ and I am not exactly popular with the other ranking mages of the Dynasty. Frankly, any of the others at the Bastion would only _benefit_ politically if I killed myself in some idiotic accident, I can’t – I can’t _trust anyone_ here to watch my back and not put a knife in it the second I give them an opening.”

Caleb hesitates, before finally offering, “You… you could ask me.” And then, hastily: “Or any of us. We can _help you_ , if you let us.”

Essek presses the heel of one hand against his eyes like he’s warding off a headache. “You are… you all aren’t _here_ most of the time. And I can’t ask you to be. Neither can I delay my work to _wait for_ you. It’s a very kind offer, and I thank you for it, but it’s just not practical. I’m _sorry_.”

Caleb looks like he wants to argue further, but he bites his tongue and nods. “Of course, no, you’re right. I am being foolish, I apologize.” Essek grimaces at the resignation in his voice.

“I could… ” he gestures vaguely to the room around them. “I believe I have a pair of _Sending_ stones around here somewhere. I could give you one? And keep the other with me? Just in case of emergency. Would that do?”

The relief on Caleb’s face is like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. “ _Ja_ ,” he says, “I think that would do very well.”

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a fill for Day 28 of Whumptober (accidents), but then it kind of turned into a wizard tower dungeon crawl. Oh well!


End file.
